2) Bragging about extending free trade agreements, but promising that they will stop and reverse outsourcing by wagging their fingers about it and eliminating “tax loopholes” that they are implying are greater than the wage differential between American and Chinese workers.

4) Bragging about GM bailouts (tiny fraction of the Wall Street bailouts which they claim Obama OPPOSES!), even though the government didn’t tie bail outs to things like making US fuel efficiency standards match first world levels, likely insuring that they will be bankrupt again within a few years.

6) Obama cut $2 trillion in spending. Yay! Wait, what did he cut? No mention… obviously it was bad, wasteful stuff, unlike the rest of the stuff he didn’t cut. Trust us.

7) Promises that the Affordable Care Act “won’t be the end” of healthcare reform efforts… so… universal insurance like the rest of the first world? Nope, but more “health funding targeted towards blacks, Latinos, and gays.” Enjoy the empty shout-outs while you can, guys.

8) Takes credit for reducing “racial disparities in drug sentencing laws.” That’s right, did you know the punishment for equal amounts of crack vs cocaine is now ONLY 20 TIMES AS HIGH!

9) Quoting MLK about volunteerism… you forgot another great MLK line, “My country is the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.”

10) Still talking about a fantasy Al Qaeda from the intro on, proud that Obama has DOUBLED the yearly spending on Afghan war since taking office.

11) “We have responsibly ended the war in Iraq.” NO. The Iraqi parliament ended the war in Iraq by refusing to continue immunity for US soldiers accused of crimes. The Obama admin. pressured them against this and wanted to extend the war. Why is this important? If they’re lying about that why do you think they’ll be honest about Afghanistan?

12) “The Democratic Party knows there is no greater responsibility than protecting the American people,” from their paragraph on the military. War machine uber alles.

13) As long as anyone else in the world has nuclear weapons, Obama promises us that we will too. Because they are really useful, apparently. Meanwhile the president of Iran (and I’m not a fan) is calling for a nuclear-free world NOW, something most of the world’s leaders would strongly agree with.

14) Having the biggest military in the world is non-negotiable. (Ironic, as our build-ups are what justify other countries’ imitation, and our cast-off arms become their new arsenals.)

15) Did you think ending the war in Iraq would lead to decreasing the military’s power? NOPE, it’s time to “retool our forces.” $$$!!!

16) Democrats see vibrant democracies “from Mexico to Chile,” i.e. a narco-state of stolen elections and a country now ruled by fans of the old dictatorship who spray rubber bullets at an emerging nationwide protest movement, but (besides maybe Colombia) the only “conservative allies” we have left in Latin America.

However, they are deeply concerned about democracy in Venezuela, where the Socialist Party has swept more fair elections than any other coalition in the hemisphere (affirms Jimmy Carter among many other objective voices.)

PS –Obama will NOT apologize for US-backed death squads throughout the hemisphere, despite which Romney decided to title his book “No Apologies!” and make the idea that Obama somehow apologized for extreme American evil his primary foreign policy issue.

17) Promises to combat efforts by other countries to persecute gay people. I’m sure our strong allies, the Gulf monarchs, will follow through on this any day now.

18) The President has “steadily worked to build an international framework to combat climate change.”

CONTRAST: Leading climate change denier Marc Morano: “As skeptics, we tip our hat to President Obama in helping crush and continue to defeat the United Nations process. Obama has been a great friend of global warming skeptics at these conferences. President Obama could not have turned out better when it came to his lack of interest in the congressional climate bill and his lack of interest in the United Nations Kyoto Protocol.”CONCLUSION:

The platform devotes nearly 10 times as much space to justifications for militarism as it does to addressing either environmental problems or financial reform.

It’s is a pretty expensive collection of words, many of them false but most just empty. Where is the accountability that comes from responding to critics? I.e. REAL critics, civil society groups, etc… not just bullshit talking points from Republicans.

Well, there it is ladies and gentleman, your Lesser Evil Platform of 2012.

May 1, 2009

The Distant Ocean has this excellent breakdown of what Obama really thinks about the rest of the world and the role of power in it:

“I think it’s important to recognize, given historic suspicions, that the United States’ policy should not be interference in other countries, but that also means that we can’t blame the United States for every problem that arises in the hemisphere.”

“Historic suspicions”? Yes, I imagine the International Court of Justice decision condemning the United States for its covert war against Nicaragua might have raised Nicaraguan suspicions of U.S. interference. And I guess the report of the UN’s Historical Clarification Commission for Guatemala, documenting U.S. backing of the genocidal forces the U.S. had installed in the 1954 coup, might have made the Guatemalans suspicious. And I suppose watching U.S. planes, helicopter gunships, and warships destroying the El Chorrillo neighborhood of Panama during the 1989 invasion might have given the Panamians some suspicions about U.S. interference.

(For just one second, imagine the U.S. reaction if Germany’s Angela Merkel gave a speech in Israel calling out the “historic suspicions” of Jews regarding past German “interference” in their affairs. In fairness to Obama, he did subsequently refer to “past errors, where those errors have been made,” though he also said that discussion of these errors only rises to the level of “stale debates” about the past; I’ll leave the analogy to you.)

You take a country like Venezuela — I have great differences with Hugo Chavez on matters of economic policy and matters of foreign policy. His rhetoric directed at the United States has been inflammatory. There have been instances in which we’ve seen Venezuela interfere with some of the — some of the countries that surround Venezuela in ways that I think are a source of concern.

So centuries of extensively-documented U.S. intervention in Latin America can be dismissed as “historic suspicions”—but when we’re talking about allegations pulled out of the collective ass of the U.S. government and leveled at an official enemy, there’s no longer any need to qualify the interference (which any reasonable person should agree is rightly a “source of concern” to us, though Obama tried to keep this menacing threat in perspective by noting that “Venezuela is a country whose defense budget is probably 1/600th of the United States”).

And this was Obama’s laugh line in response to Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega’s account of just a tiny portion of the vicious U.S. interference that produced these historic suspicions:

“I am very grateful that President Ortega didn’t blame me for things that happened when I was three months old,” Obama said in his only direct reference to the Nicaraguan leader.

(“I am very glad that Prime Minister Netanyahu didn’t blame me for things that happened before I was born,” Merkel said in her only direct reference to the Israeli leader.) The article also notes that Ortega “prompted a smirk from Obama when he referred to ‘Yankee troops.'” Yes, what a hilarious anachronism! How amusing our victims can sometimes be! Like when the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua would cut off men’s testicles and leave them in their mouths? Hey, what’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Oh, no, my mistake, you’ve got a mouthful of balls! Ha ha ha! Maybe Obama should have quipped, “I am very grateful that President Ortega didn’t blame me for the castrations and nun-raping that happened when I was still snorting cocaine in my youth.” The laughs just never stop, do they?

The smirk in question—which, as this small survey of his comments indicates, was only the most visible sign of Obama’s paternalistic contempt for the banana republicans all around him and their petty obsession with the hundreds of thousands of their citizens killed by direct and indirect U.S. intervention over the years—looked something like this:

All of which illustrates why Obama truly is a perfect representative for the U.S.A., since he is, without a doubt, one of the most unbelievably sanctimonious assholes I’ve ever heard.

December 17, 2008

Millions of people (both in the US and around the world) feel hopeful about the election of Barack Obama. Since his father was African, many people from the world’s poor majority believe he will be more sympathetic to their struggles. Since he’s only been in politics a few years, many people here believe he won’t continue the mistakes of our past leaders in these times of great crisis.

Also you can help by passing this site on to friends and linking to it on sites and forums. I welcome any criticism and conversation, the easiest way to contact me is by posting a comment on this site.

We didn’t vote for another Bush term so let’s do whatever we can not to get one. Spread the word to people you know who voted for Obama. Follow your conscience, keep your hope up and remember politicians never bring change, but they sometimes respond to it.

He wants to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, despite the fact that history has shown that only real social investment and not military force can bring peace to the region, one of the poorest and most miserable on earth.

Obama’s anti-Palestinian stance is in some ways the strongest of any US president ever, and directly opposed to opinion of the people’s and governments of every other nation on earth. He does not seek a two-state end to the Israeli conquest, says he will not negotiate with the elected government of Palestine, and claims that Jerusalem should be considered the capital of Israel, something no other president or world leader has ever before seriously proposed.

The plight of the Palestinian people is a huge cause of foreign support for anti-US terrorism (due to our government’s financing of the majority of the military operations against them).

December 17, 2008

Socialism for the Megarich

Barack Obama has been almost universally supportive of President Bush’s plans to throw free money from tax payers to extremely wealthy investors whose recklessness brought about this, the greatest world economic crisis in 70 years. Right now we are looking at EIGHT AND A HALF TRILLION DOLLARAS being handed out, at a time when all kinds of necessary spending on human needs and a sustainable economy are being rejected due to “lack of funds.”

Obama supports a multibillion dollar giveaway to US automakers, whose commitment to producing fuel inefficient vehicles (and fighting of legislation to improve fuel efficiency standards) has brought them to bankruptcy. It does not appear that Obama will require much change in the kind of vehicles the “Big 3” produce as part of the bailout.

A Fake “Green Economy”

One of the few inspirations for hope in our current economic problems was the chance that they would cause the institution of the kinds of radical economic changes that humanity needs to survive coming resource shortages.

In fact, as currently produced it takes more energy to produce ethanol than can be derived from it–it only exists dude to massive government subsidies, the same subsidies that cause non-subsidized farmers in the developing world to go bankrupt when “free trade” agreement banning their tariffs are enforced, as Obama plans to continue doing.

Obama opposes critical fuel taxes (supported by every leading environmental scientist and environmental body) that would be used to support the development of alternative energy.

There is now emerging historical consensus that targeted public spending–and NOT tax cuts for wealthy corporations and individuals–is the best way to help the real economy recover and grow.

Healthcare

Obama opposes universal healthcare (aka “single payer”) , which is supported by most Americans and is successfully used by most developed nations to provide healthcare to all their citizens at a fraction of the cost of what Americans spend per person each year. His plan amounts to forcing people to pay inefficient private insurance companies.

Good public spending benefits the economy far more than tax cuts. Note that infrastructure spending that leads to renewable power, public transit and energy efficiency has an even greater return on dollar invested. Even greater is the value of simply regulating best-practices of efficiency into all new production, construction, and design.

Drafted resolutions condemning the World Court’s for criticizng Israel’s construction of a “security wall” inside the terrority of another country and major human right’s groups condemnation of Israeli targetting of cilivians inside Palestine and Lebanon. (Because it’s not enough for us just to finance these crimes, we also have to immediately officially condemn any ethical organization that brings them to light.

Robert Gates, Secretary of “Defense”

First ever military chief to be carried over from a president of a different party.

Oversaw the deadly imposition of “Structural Adjustment” throughout the globe, destroying a majority of the economy of the former USSR, catalyzing crises in Asia and Latin America, and reducing the quality of life for hundreds of millions of poor people through requiring cuts to social safety nets, privatizing of public industries, and the free reign of financial speculation across the globe.

Your tax money at work.Death squads and nuclear weapons, military and energy waste, financial chaos, lack of social safety nets…Do we want more of the same, or real change that brings progress for all people?